Most histories of the Civil War era portray the struggle over
slavery as a conflict that exclusively pitted North against South, free
labor against slave labor, and black against white. In Freedom's Frontier,
Stacey L. Smith examines the battle over slavery as it unfolded on the
multiracial Pacific Coast. Despite its antislavery constitution,
California was home to a dizzying array of bound and semibound labor
systems: African American slavery, American Indian indenture, Latino and
Chinese contract labor, and a brutal sex traffic in bound Indian and
Chinese women. Using untapped legislative and court records, Smith
reconstructs the lives of California's unfree workers and documents the
political and legal struggles over their destiny as the nation moved
through the Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction.

Smith
reveals that the state's anti-Chinese movement, forged in its struggle
over unfree labor, reached eastward to transform federal Reconstruction
policy and national race relations for decades to come. Throughout, she
illuminates the startling ways in which the contest over slavery's fate
included a western struggle that encompassed diverse labor systems and
workers not easily classified as free or slave, black or white.

A few blurbs:

"A real winner: ambitious, thoughtful, and splendidly
rendered. Smith peels back history to rework the labor landscapes of
nineteenth-century California and reintroduce the state into dynamic,
Reconstruction-era political and social debates."--William Deverell

"A brilliant and long overdue examination of
late-nineteenth-century California's complicated race and labor history.
By comparing the stories of bound Native American, African American,
Chinese, Latino, and Hawaiian workers, Smith reveals the complexities of
California's racial and labor histories and goes even further to
demonstrate the larger implications for the California experience for
understanding national stories of abolition, emancipation,
Reconstruction, and immigration."--Michael Magliari